Electronic mail (“email”) systems typically include one or more “mailbox” containers. Common mailboxes in existing systems include an “Inbox” mailbox for storing received messages, an “Outbox” for storing messages that are to be sent, a “Sent Items” mail box for storing messages that have been sent, a “Deleted Items” mailbox for storing messages that have been deleted, and others that may be system defined or defined by the user as “folders” to organize messages as needed. At any given point in time, each mailbox may contain many individual electronic mail messages. Some existing email systems operate by forming local replicas of a user's mailboxes on the client computer system, based on stored copies of the messages on a server system. A problem may occur in these systems because a significant amount of disk space may be used on the client system as the local mailbox replicas increase in size. Accordingly, a local mailbox may have an associated size limit that cannot be exceeded. In order to meet such size limits, and to generally reduce the sizes of local mailboxes, there are different things a user can do through existing systems, each of which have certain disadvantages.
First, a user can simply delete certain email messages from their mailbox manually. Unfortunately, this manual approach of may take a significant amount of user time to perform. Second, in some existing systems, a user can define mailbox replication settings causing the email system to remove documents that have not been modified over some period of time. This approach has the disadvantage that it typically removes documents indiscriminately with regard to their importance. As a result, messages may be removed that are important to the user, such as those that may have only recently been read. Finally, archiving mechanisms on some systems allow a user to make explicit definitions of selection statements identifying documents to be archived by transfer to a server system remote from the client. These systems enable a user to indicate a maximum message age above which messages should be archived. For example, some systems allow a user to manually enter an archive setting specifically indicating that only documents from person ‘x’ that are older than ninety days are to be remotely archived. However, such manual systems require the local user to continually modify such archive settings to reflect the user's current message archiving needs. In addition, users may not have sufficient time to create and maintain such manual archive settings as their work assignments or roles change, resulting in new message archiving needs. Moreover, it is important to carefully determine which messages are to be archived, since after a document is moved to a remote archive, it becomes more difficult to access. Full text searches, sorting, and other features may not work on archived documents. Archives themselves may be difficult for the user to locate. These archiving systems do not automatically determine information regarding which other users and which terms are important for a given user of the client system, and accordingly cannot make use of such information in selecting messages to be archived.